Selfie-editing apps are taking over the world

Facebook has been pushing me selfie-editing apps. I hope it’s not
trying to send a message. Presumably, it’s because I belong to
the demographic that uses them: I’m a Millennial woman.

These image alteration tools are a vast new category. Searching
"selfie editor" in the iTunes App Store yields more than 600
results, all with vaguely insensitive names like FaceTune,
Modiface, and Perfect365.

They're wildly popular, too. A survey of social-media using
adults conducted last year by
Harris Interactive for the Renfrew Center found that 50% of
people who post images of themselves online retouch them first.
Of people who retouch their images, 48% remove blemishes, 15%
correct paleness, 12% edit images because they don’t like how
they look in general, and 6% edit images to look slimmer. As
Renfrew VP Adrienne Ressler concluded: "We feel pressured to edit
and alter our images so we look like what we think of as our
‘best selves’ instead of our real selves."

I scoffed at first: #SELFIE culture wasn't my style, and I wasn’t
going to contribute to the trend of digitally altering images to
conform to sexist ideals. But one day curiosity got the better of
me. Facetune cost only $3.99, and with a a single tap, the
seduction was complete.

Digital retouching is charting the course of most customs in
society — common practice creates acceptance — like answering a
cell phone in a restaurant. Thus apps like FaceTuner are
increasingly not considered vain behavior but normal behavior.
Our new reality is a highly edited one; should we now assume that
personal images posted on social media are, well, "modi-faced?"

Studies are exploring if people who "post selfies on social media
sites [are] narcissistic and psychopathic, or self-objectifying,
or both," writes Gwendolyn Seidman, Ph.D on
Psychology Today. Dr. Seidman goes on to detail a current
study which examines the selfie and its relationship to the "Dark
Triad" — "[n]arcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism."

Taking a blemish off my face, however, seems a far cry from, say,
actively manipulating people for the purpose of
power. Indeed, cheap or
free and intuitively designed selfie-editing apps could be called
the populist Photoshop, demystifying the perfection of models
while giving everyone else a way to compete.

Certainly, the retouching and the manipulation of images is not
new. Idealized portraiture goes back to royal painters, trying
their hardest to polish up the inbred King Charles II of Spain.

Photographs themselves have
been tinkered with dating back to the mid-1800s when watercolors
were applied to images to give women and children rosy cheeks and
golden hair. In "Faking
It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop," an exhibit from the Metropolitan Museum
in 2012, "photography's pre-digital repertoire" included
"slimming waistlines and smoothing away wrinkles."

"Every photograph is a fake from start to finish, a purely
impersonal, unmanipulated photograph being practically
impossible," writes 20th century photographer Edward Steichen.

Perfect365

Therefore, it must be a personal decision: How much, if at all,
do you want to retouch images you plan to post? Where are the
boundaries when these apps allow us to look through the eyes of a
plastic surgeons and indulge our self-objectification with ease?
And what about the objectification of others?

In a post-Post world, if my friend has undereye bags or deep
frown-lines is it appropriate to tweak those for him or her? Do I
have to ask permission? (That’s an awkward conversation: "so
about your skin last night...") If I retouch my face and leave a
friend in the photo unsmoothed, I am essentially leaving that
person alone out in cold, hard reality. It creates an odd
imbalance within a single picture.

With these apps, the only thing stopping a "total makeover" of
the self would be that the photo needs to resemble you. There’s
no social validation otherwise. Reception of obvious Photoshop
effects is akin to the social backlash that occurs when a person
sports a streaky spray tan. It’s vain and artificial if it’s
obvious, but there seems to be an unspoken agreement: As long as
do it subtly, you can shrink your nose as much as you’d like.

If you decide to go ahead and download one of these puppies —
boy, are they addicting. How quickly can you take yourself from
you, normal, to you with Keane eyes? Or you, tired looking, to a
resident of the Uncanny Valley? Or perhaps you’ll manage to find
a slight retouch that makes you look well-rested. Of course, in
an ideal world, we would all work on accepting ourselves as we
are (cue the next Dove campaign). But this is assuming that
cameras are true to reality — they distort and flatten the image
as well.

Loving yourself and loving your selfie aren’t necessarily at
odds. For me, I think the selfie retouching apps are like nachos:
a sometimes food. I need a rule like this because I can see a
world in which I become obsessed with looking "Perfect365" — but
that’s where it crosses a line from casual wrinkle smoother to
one-woman propaganda machine, like Kim Kardashian. Being
perpetually photogenic? Those woods are lovely dark and deep, but
come on. Sometimes it’s laundry day.